 Okay, welcome back to SuperCloud 2. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante here in our Palo Alto SuperLive performance all day, unpacking the wave of SuperCloud. This is our second edition, back for keynote review here as the Victoria Villarino talking about the hype and the reality of the SuperCloud momentum. Victoria, great to see you. You got a presentation looking forward to hearing the update. It's always great to be here on this stage with you guys. So the business imperative for Cloud right now is clear and the SuperCloud wave points to the builders and they want to break through. VMware, you guys have a lot of builders in the ecosystem. Where do you guys see multi-cloud today? What's going on? So what we see, we're talking about customers that customers are in a state of cloud chaos. Raghura Guram, our CEO introduced this term at our user conference and it really resonated with our customers. And the chaos comes from the fact that most enterprises have applications spread across private cloud, multiple hyperscalers and the edge increasingly. And so with that, every hyperscaler brings their own vertical integrated stack of infrastructure, development platforms, security, and so on and so forth. And so our customers are left with a ballooning cost because they can have to train their employees across multiple stacks and the costs are only going up. Have you talked about the SuperCloud with your customers? What are they looking for when they look at the business value of cross-cloud services? Why are they digging into it? What are some of the reasons? First of all, let's put this in perspective. 97% of customers use two or more cloud, including the private cloud. And 55%, look at this, 55% use three or more clouds. And so when you talk to these customers, they're all asking for two things. One, they find that managing the multi-cloud is more difficult than the private cloud. And that goes without saying because it's new, they don't have the skills, and they have many of these. And pretty much everybody, 87% of them are seeing their costs getting out of control. And so they need a new approach. We believe that the industry needs a new approach to solving the multi-cloud problem, which you guys have introduced, and you call it the super cloud. We call it cross-cloud services. But the idea is that, and the parallel goes back to the private cloud. In the private cloud, if you remember the old days, before we call it the private cloud, we would install SAP. And the CIO will go, oh, I hear SAP works great on HP hardware. Oh, let's buy the HP stack, right? And then you are, oh, Oracle Database is there from phenomenally on Sun stack. That's another stack. And it was sustainable, right? And so VMware came in with virtualization and made everything look the same. And we unleashed a tremendous era of growth and speed and cost saving for our customers. So we believe, and I think the industry also believes, if you look at the success of super cloud first instance and today, that we need to create a new level of abstraction in the cloud. And this abstraction needs to be at a higher level. It needs to be built around the lingua franca of the cloud, which is Kubernetes, APIs, open source stacks. And by doing so, we're going to allow our customers to have a more unified wave of building, managing, running, connecting and securing applications across cloud. So where should that standardization occur? Because we're going to hear from some customers today, when I asked them about cloud chaos, they're like, well, the way we deal with cloud chaos is monocloud. They sort of put on the blinders, right? But of course, they may be risking not being able to take advantage of best of breed. So where should that standardization layer occur across clouds? Well, I also hear that from some customers. Oh, we're one cloud. They are in denial. There's no question about it. In fact, when I met at our user conference with a number of CIOs and I went around the room and I asked them, I saw the entire spectrum. First of all, in denial, oh, we're using AWS. That's a great, and the private cloud. So we're all set. Okay, thank you. Next, oh, the business units are using AWS. Oh, okay, so you have three. Oh, and we just bought a company that is using Google back in Europe. So, okay, so you got four right there. So that person in denial. Now you have the second category of customers. They are seeing the problem, they're ahead of the pack and they're building their solution. We're going to hear from Walmart later today. So they're building their own. Not everybody has the skills and the skill of Walmart to build their own. So eventually, then you get to the third category of customers that are actually buying solution from one of the many ISVs that you're going to talk with today, you know, whether it's Azure Corp or Snowflake or all this. I would argue any new company, any new ISV is by definition a multi-cloud service company, right? And so these people or they are buying our cross-cloud services to solve this problem. So that's the spectrum of customers out there. What's the stack you're focusing on specifically? What is VMware? Because virtualization is not going away. You're seeing a lot more in the cloud with networking, for example, the subtraction layer. What specifically are you guys focusing on? So I like to talk about this beyond what VMware does, just because I think this is an industry movement and market is forming around multi-cloud services. And so it's an approach that pretty much a whole industry is taking of building this abstraction layer. In our approach is to bring these services together to simplify things even further. So initially we were the first to see multi-cloud happening, you know, Ragu and Sanjay backing, what is like 2016, 17. So this coming and our first foray in multi-cloud was to take vSphere and our hypervisor and port it natively on all the hyperscader, which is a phenomenal solution to get your enterprise application in the cloud and modernize them. But then we realized that customers were already in the cloud natively. And so we had to have a religion discussion internally and drop that hypervisor religion and say, yeah, we need to go and help our customers where they are in a native cloud. And that's why we brought back Pivotal, we built Tanzu around it, we shipped it and then Aria and so basically our evolution was to go from our hypervisor to cloud native and then eventually we ended up with what we believe is the most comprehensive multi-cloud services solution that covers application development with Tanzu, management with Aria, and then you have NSX for security and user computing for connect TV. And so we believe that we have the most comprehensive set of integrated services to solve the challenges of multi-cloud bringing extra simplicity into the picture. I someone say multi-cloud and multi-environment when you get to the distributed computing with the edge, you're going to need that capability. And you guys have been very successful with private cloud but to be devil's advocate, you guys have been great with private cloud but some are saying like, don't get public cloud yet. How do you answer that? Because there's a lot of work that you guys have done in public cloud. And it seems like private cloud successes are moving up into public cloud, like networking is seeing a lot of that being configured in. So the enterprise grade solutions are moving into the cloud. So what would you say to the skeptics out this? Oh, I think you got private cloud nailed down but they don't really, you don't really have public cloud. First of all, we love skeptics. Our engineering team love skeptics and love to prove them wrong. And I would never ever bet against our engineering team. So I believe that VMware has been so successful in building the private cloud and the technology that actually became the foundation for the public cloud. But that is always hard to be known in a new environment. It's there's always that period where you have to prove yourself. But what I love about VMware is that VMware has what I believe, what I like to call enterprise pragmatism. The private cloud is not going away. So we're gonna help our customers there. And then as they move to the cloud, we're gonna give them an option to adopt the cloud at their own pace with VMware cloud to allow them to move to the cloud and be able to rely on that enterprise class capabilities we built on-prem in the cloud. But then with Tanzu and Aria and the rest of the Cross Cloud Service portfolio being able to meet them where they are. If they're ready in the cloud, have them have a single place to build application, a single place to manage application and so on. You know, Dave, we were talking about in the opening, Victoria, I want to get your reaction to this because we were saying in the opening that the market's obviously pushing this next gen. You see chat GPT of the success of these new apps are coming out. The business models are demanding kind of a digital transformation. The tech, the builders are out there and you guys have an interesting view because your customer base is almost the canary in the coal mine because this is an operations challenge as well as just enabling the cloud needs. I want to get your thoughts on, you know, that your customer base, VMware customers, they've been in IT ops for generations. And now as that crowd moves and sees this super cloud environment, it's IT again, but it's everywhere. It's not just IT in a data center. It's on-premises, it's cloud, it's edge. So almost your customer base is like a canary in the coal mine for this movement of how do you operationalize in multiple environments, which includes clouds, which includes apps. I mean, this is the core question. And I want to make this an industry conversation. Forget about VMware for a second. We believe that there are like four or five major pillars that you need to implement to create this level of obstruction. It starts from observability. You need to know where your apps are, where your data is, how the applications are performing, what is the security posture, what is the performance. So then you can do something about it. We call that the observability part of this created this obstruction. The second one is security. So you need to be, sorry, infrastructure. And infrastructure, creating an obstruction layer for infrastructure means to be able to give the applications and the developer will build the application the right infrastructure for the application at the right time, whether it's a VM, whether it's a Kubernetes cluster or whether it's microservices and so on and so forth. And so that allows our developers to think about infrastructure just as code. It's available, whatever application needs, whatever the cost makes sense for my application. The third part is security. And I can give you a very, very simple example. Say that I was talking to a CIO of a major insurance company in Europe. And this thing is saying to me, the developers went wild, built all this great front office applications. Now the business is coming to me and says, what is that my compliance report? And the guy is saying, say that I want to implement the policies that says I want to encrypt all my data, no matter where it resides. How does it do it? It needs to have somebody logging in into Amazon and configure it, then go to Google configure it, go to the private cloud, that's time and cost, right? So you need to have a way to enforce security policy from the infrastructure to the app, to the firewall in one place and distributed across. And finally, the developer experience, right? Developers, developers, developers, developers. We're always trying to keep up with- You can dance if you want and do it with the cheap armor. Yeah, let's not make a fool of myself, but more than usual. But developers are the kings and queens of the hill. They are, why? Because they build the application that are making us money and saving us money. And so we need, and right now, they have to go into these different stacks. So you need to give developers two things. One, a common development experience across these different Kubernetes distribution. And two, a way for the operators to your point. The operators have fallen behind the developers. And they cannot go to the developer there and tell them, this is how you're gonna do things. They have to see how they're doing things and figure out how to bring the gallery underneath so that developers can be developers, but the operators can lay down the tracks and the infrastructure that is secure and compliant. So two big inferences from that. One is self-serve infrastructure. In a decentralized cloud, a super cloud world, you've got to have self-serve infrastructure. It's got to be simple. And the second is governance. You mentioned security, but it's also governance, data sovereignty, as we talked about. So the question I have, Victoria, is where does the customer start? So I, it always depends on the business need, but to me, the foundational layer is observability. If you don't know where your stuff is, you cannot manage, you cannot secure it. You cannot manage its cost. So I think observability is the bar to entry. And then it depends on the business needs. So we go back to the CIO that I talked to is clearly struggling with compliance and security. And so, like many customers, so that's maybe where they start. There are other customers that are a little behind the head of the pack in terms of building applications, right? And so they're looking at this, you know, innovative companies that have the developers that get the cloud and build all this application. They are leader in the industry. They're saying, how do I get some of that? Well, the way you get some of that is by adopting modern application development and platform operation capabilities. So that's maybe where they should start. And so on and so forth. It really depends on the business, but to me, observability is the foundational part of this. Vittorio, we've been on this conversation with you for over a year and a half now with SuperCloud. You've been a leader in seeing the wave, you and Raghu and the team at VMware, among other industry leaders. This is our second event. If you're, in the minute and a half that we have left, when you get asked, what is this SuperCloud multi-cloud, cross-cloud thing, what's it mean? I mean, I mentioned earlier, market, the business models are changing, text changing. Society needs more economic value out of the cloud. Builders are out there. If someone says, hey, Vittorio, what's the bottom line? What's really going on? Why should I pay attention to this wave? What's going on? How would you describe the relevance of SuperCloud? I think that this industry is full of smart vendors and smart customers. And if you're smart about it, we look at the history of IT. And the history of IT repeats itself over and over again. You follow, he said, follow the money. I say follow the developers. That's how I made my career. I follow great developers. I look at a, you know, Keith Colbert and say, okay, I'm gonna get behind that guy, whatever is going on, I'll try to add value to that person. I look at Raghu and all the great engineers that I was blessed to work with. And so the engineers go and explore new territories and then the rest of the stacks move around. The developers have gone multi-cloud and just like in any iteration of IT, at some point the way you get the right scale at the right cost is with obstruction. And you can see it everywhere from, you know, bits and bytes integration to SOA, to APIs and microservices. You can see it now from best-of-breed hyperscaler across multiple clouds to creating an obstruction layer or super cloud that creates a unified way of building, managing, running, securing and accessing obligations. So if you're a customer, a minute and a half. If you're a customer that are out there and feeling the pain, you gotta adopt this. If you're a customer that's behind and saying maybe even denial, look at the customers that are solving the problems today and we're gonna have some today. See what they're doing and learn from them so you don't make the same mistakes and you can get there ahead of them. Gracely's law, John, Brian Gracely. Yeah, and I think one of the developers is interesting and the other big wave I want to get your comment real quick is the developers aren't just application developers. They're network developers. The stack has completely been software enabled so you have software-defined networking. You have all kinds of software at all aspects of observability, infrastructure, security. The developers are everywhere. It's not just software, software is everywhere. Yeah, developers, developers, developers. The other thing that we can tell, I can tell, and we know because we live in Silicon Valley, we worship developers, but if you're out there in manufacturing, healthcare, if you have developers that understand the stuff, pamper them, keep them happy. If you don't have them, figure out where they hang out and go recruit them because their developers indeed make the world, the IT world go around. Victoria, thank you for coming on with the opening keynote here for SuperCloud 2. We're going to unpack what SuperCloud is all about in our second edition of our live performance here in Palo Alto Virtual Event. We're going to talk to customers, experts, leaders, investors, everyone who's looking at the future, what's being enabled by this new big wave coming on called SuperCloud. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.